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In one of the many twists of the ZER01 tale, another truly putrid company, Hop-On Inc, has announced its partnership with Global Verge to sell nicotine delivery devices, "Electric Cigarettes". So far, Global Verge has not acknowledged this "partnership".

Another former ZER01 partner, Pervasip Inc, has launched its own $69 VOIP service for the Nokia N900 Maemo. So far, no known sales.

Global Verge also sells the "Golden Eggs™", a pair of brass balls that purify tap water or bottled water...

Reason2, SCO used to be a real company, called Caldera.
They had one of the most successful IPO ever (as a Linux company), back in the dotcom era. Their main product was Caldera Linux.

Their moneymaker (moneyloser, since SCO has never posted a profit) is SCO UnixWare and SCO Openserver, two legacy OSes that cannot compete either with Windows (any version) or Linux.

They announced with great fanfare that they would become a player in the Mobile arena, but it took them 3 years to launch a product for the iPhone, FC MobileLife, $4.99 ranked #337 in Productivity apps.

They have been in bankruptcy for the past 3 years. After 2.5 years the Delaware judge named a Trustee, who have worked hard to keep the Litigation alive, by racking up $600K of past-due payable (by not paying the bankruptcy lawyers).

Currently they are seeking approval for an asset sale, their whole Mobile Division, including 12 servers and several software product, to their former CEO, for ... $35,000 (the sale cost more than that to set up).

The have announced another upcoming asset sale, a JAVA virtual machine patent (probably invalid due to prior art and obviousness), for $100K...

They have recently obtained a $2M loan from their main shareholder, which gives him superpriority over any other creditors, and first dibs on the IP that SCO happens to own.

The latest news I saw, Verge was telling its associates not to worry about Zer01 severing its relationship with Buzzirk and Verge, they would have ANOTHER phone peddler lined up real soon now, in a matter of days, at the same conditions, $79.99 UNLIMITED everything.

So, after bragging of Zer01 unique proprietary technology for months, and of it backbone ownership and its billions of virtual capitalization, they say they can turn around and find another company with the SAME product ? I don't think so.

Oh, and they tell their associates not to worry, their checks are in the mail; as long you keep paying your $49.99 every month, you'll receive $1 for every chump you signed and who keeps paying $49.99 for nothing at all.

Derek, can you tell us about the technological gotchas in using VOIP to carry cell phone voice ?

0) Let's assume Ze01 has a carrier, and we'll have to assume further that this carrier charge them peanuts for unlimited use of their cell phone towers. Yes, admittedly this is quite unrealistic.

1) Is there any point in converting voice to "VOIP" ? All voice signal is carried as digital packets already for all current cell phones.

2) Won't the VOIP trick degrade sound quality ? With IP packets, there no guarantee all packets arrive on time and in the right order, yes ?

3) How does the cell phone process the VOIP conversion, is this done at the hardware level, or packet-per-packet by a JAVA routine ? If so, running that much JAVA code in real time may really use up battery life, IMHO.

4) Where does the VOIP goes ? Regular phones cannot receive VOIP as such, so there must be one or several servers to convert it back to regular voice telephone signal. Does Zero01 have one single datacenter to decode the expected millions of VOIP streams, or one in each US region ?

5) Zer01 has alluded several times to its technical team: how many enginers have they, where is their lab located, and what's the name of Zer01 CTO ?